School Update

Every other week Josiah gets a report card sent home.

(Remember if you click on the pictures, 

they will enlarge and you can actually read them.)

You can see on this first report card he received multiple triangles ("not good"). And the only thing he received a "good" on is "able to understand and express his/her own needs and feeling," which could just be their way of putting a positive spin on all the crying that was happening.

But the most recent report card is much better. No triangles and lots of check marks! Of course, it's a completely different list, so how do you compare? I've also been told that local kindergartens always start off giving kids a negative review in order to show improvement. 

Still, things are going much, much better. Josiah has not cried for several weeks and very willingly goes into the classroom. He will still tell me that he doesn't want to go but in the next breath tell me something he is excited about. 

One thing that has helped is a new friend, Keyton. Keyton's family is from Canada and he has 2 older sisters in the local primary school. Keyton is almost a year older than Josiah but they play very well together. The other day I heard Keyton declare to Josiah, "Josiah, you're my best friend!" 

Josiah has known the names of the non-local kids in his class since he started (Erin, Azia, Rebecca, Jacobo, etc.), but until today never talked about any of the local kids with non-English names. Today he told me about Fan-Fan. Of course, he declared to me that Fan-Fan looked funny, but when I spoke with his teachers about it, they agreed that Fan-Fan is a funny looking kid!

So along with report cards, I get a weekly syllabus for what he is learning. 

And check out these snacks for May! 

Sushi on the 31st? Who thinks that is a good idea??

Josiah now has 3 homework books: one to write letters, one for numbers, and one for Chinese characters. He generally enjoys the work and does NOT want me to help him. 

On the weekends, the school sends home a library book (along with regular homework) and Josiah and I have to compete a book report. I have to write a paragraph about my feelings towards the book and Josiah has to complete what you see below. The book we read for this report was Dr. Seuss' "The Eye Book" and you can see what Josiah drew when I suggested he draw some "eyes." 

 The kids have multiple other books with worksheet pages that they use during class. This came home today and made me very proud. It says, "Josiah can read bus in Chinese!"

The theme this week was transportation and they made these little boats. There was a small pool on the playground today where they attempted to sail their boats, but Josiah said it didn't work. So our plan tomorrow is to make his boat sail!

And he also brought home this lovely Mother's Day flower! :)

As hard as it was (and probably will be again), I'm glad we put Josiah in school. The little confident extrovert that we saw during our stability in Michigan had disappeared during all this transition. But school has given him social confidence again. He has also learned to eat lots of new things and made new friends. He sings lots of songs in both Cantonese and Mandarin and is starting to tell me some of his new Cantonese vocabulary. The trip to and from school on a bike with a baby is not always the easiest (especially in the rain or extreme heat), but we get out of the house every day and I get 3 hours alone with Daniel. Plus I've made some new friends too!

So there you have it, an update on school.